Join Nicholas Mirzoeff, poet Omar Zahzah, and comrades from the Center for Convivial Research and Autonomy as they discuss To See in the Dark: Palestine and Visual Activism Since October 7 on Sunday, March 23, 6:00 pm. To see Palestine is to see the world. Since October 7th 2023, the forces of racial capitalism and settler colonialism have become all too visible in Israel's genocidal war on Gaza.Visual culture theorist Nicholas Mirzoeff, visiting from New York, is joined by local Palestinian poet-scholar-activist Omar Zahzah, author of the forthcoming Terms of Servitude: Zionism, Silicon Valley, and Digital/Settler-Colonialism in the Palestinian Liberation Struggle. Comrades from the Center for Convivial Research and Autonomy will be sitting in.
In To See In the Dark, Nicholas Mirzoeff explores how images, and especially video, viewed outside Palestine enabled a dramatic switch in public opinion, leading to a global uprising against the genocide. In this groundbreaking analysis, he connects the personal and the political through his own anti-Zionist Jewishness and its histories of violence. The result is a new collective and anti-colonial way of seeing, intersecting online and embodied experience.
BIOS
Among the founders of visual culture as a field, Nicholas Mirzoeff has also written extensively on Jewishness and Palestine. His books include How To See The World, The Right to Look and The Appearance of Black Lives Matter. He has written for the Guardian, Hyperallergic and The Nation. He lives in New York City.
Omar Zahzah is an Assistant Professor of Arab, Muslim, Ethnicities and Diaspora Studies (AMED) in the Department of Race and Resistance Studies (RRS) at San Francisco State University. A scholar-activist of Lebanese Palestinian descent, Dr. Zahzah is the former Education and Advocacy Coordinator of Eyewitness Palestine. His book, Terms of Servitude Zionism, Silicon Valley, and Digital/Settler-Colonialism in the Palestinian Liberation Struggle, will be published by Seven Stories Press in July 2025.
The Center for Convivial Research and Autonomy is a transterritorial grassroots collective dedicated to exploring the intersections between conviviality, autonomous learning, and insurgent knowledge production with an investment in autonomous spaces of learning and grassroots convivial research in service of the recovery of convivial tools towards community regeneration.